I was just writing the previous post in TextMate, still my current favorite editor, and I noticed the icon has changed to a Jack-o-lantern. Cute.
Funny thing is that the icon still looks normal in the dock. Oops, I just restarted TextMate and the teh pumpkin head is in the dock 
And if I Apple-Tab through the open application, it still looks normal. But if I Alt-Tab (thanks to Witch), I see this cute, but rather evil looking, pumpkin head.
Of course, today *is* Halloween 
The Stern Report, “the most comprehensive review ever carried out on the economics of climate change” was just released. For anyone keeping up with the issues, there aren’t any surprises in there. But it’s reassuring to see governments taking notice and talking about the impacts of climate change in terms that are likely to make a difference: economic terms.
A word of warning. The following blog is a serious, and seriously long, rant.
You have been warned.
It’s been a great week (or two) for releases.
Today marked the release of Firefox 2.0.
We recently had the release of IE7.
The Dojo toolkit just went 0.4. Okay, so Dojo isn’t huge like FF2 or IE7, but it generated just enough buzz to make it onto my “buzz-O-scope”. Put another way, I read about it in one of the feeds I subscribe to (Sitepoint).
I’ve decided to check out some of the DHTML libraries available. Dojo is the first one I’ve put much effort into. We have a small media developers conference coming up soon targeted at development for the education market. Since we’re hosting it at Swinburne this time, I get to make the web site. Our designer guys have made up some images for me, and I’m cobbling it together. I’ve taken it as an opportunity to try out some new stuff, and in particular, I’m trying Dojo. So far I have a Google Map on the location page with minimal effort. (More effort than it needed to be due to poor documentation. Isn’t it always the case? I needed to get out my divining rod at one point, but I guess I got it right ’cause it works now.) Next on the to-try list is some drag and drop stuff.
[edit]
Oh, Wordpress MU finally went 1.0.
It makes me all warm and fuzzy to see Oakland, where I lived for several years, adopt an oil independance policy.
Now how do I get somebody to do the same around here?
I met a girl today who made me think: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
I have one hell of an ego. Why else would I subscribe to Google Alerts. Ego surfing without the effort. What could be more narcissistic?
I mentioned before how good this current job has been for my ratings on Google, but on my Google Alerts, I was just confronted with a blast from the past. A post on a news site (remember NNTP?) from 1996! I’m not sure if this impresses me, or frightens me more. That’s a post from a decade ago, still floating around out there. And now Google has indexed it.
Just be careful what you write. It *never* goes away.
I was just trying to catch a 404, page not found, error from apache. The documentation made it look easy. Just add the ErrorDocument directives to your .htaccess file
ErrorDocument 404 /error.php
This should redirect the browser to the error.php file whenever the server gets a file not found error.
But it wasn’t working!
At first I thought the path wasn’t being resolved properly because I was getting an additional 404 error saying “a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.”
So I tried making the path absolute
ErrorDocument 404 http://localhost/path/to/site/error.php
This kind of worked. But I wanted to know what page the user had tried to access that caused the 404. Apparently there is supposed to be a server variable called “REDIRECT_URL”. But PHP kept saying it wasn’t present. So after much googling, I read that…
None of these will be set if your ErrorDocument is an external redirect (i.e., anything starting with a scheme name like http:, even if it refers to the same host as the server).
Doh!
Then I realised that I was right the first time. The path was not being resolved properly. Apparently a local path needs to be relative to the server root, not to the directory the .htaccess file is in. So…
ErrorDocument 404 /~username/path/to/site/error.php
This worked a treat
I got my custom error message and I got the REDIRECT_URL server variable.
Happy, I am.
BTW, Server environment is Apache/1.3.33 (Darwin) PHP/5.0.4 on OS X 10.4.8
I’ve only been in this job a couple of months now, but we are moving office tomorrow. I don’t have much to pack. I haven’t been here long enough.
But in the big move, lots of old stuff is getting thrown out. Somebody just handed me an old Swinburne IT procurment price list dated June, 1993.
And the price?
$5938
An external SCSI 2.8GIG HD cost $7888.
A single stick of 16Meg (the biggest listed memory module) SIMM cost $1488.
Windows 3.1, available on both 3.5" and 5.25" disks, cost $274.
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Just in case this come in handy, I found a tutorial on how to dismantle an atomic bomb.